Making the PATH and other environment variables available in emacs

Question

Working with emacs in OSX can some times be troubling.

I interchange with using the Terminal.app application and the emace shell both of these use bash, and both seem to work, I do however have the problem that the environment is not setup identically in both.

I'm running a clean installation of OSX Lion, and emacs 24 from emacs and would like for the environment variables in the emacs shell to make the same as in the Terminal.app under osx. How do I fix that?

Answer 1

Just install the awesome little package exec-path-from-shell and you're done! It will automatically set your emacs exec-path to be same as the PATH in your zsh/bash config.

It will also allow you to copy the values of other shell variables like this:

(exec-path-from-shell-copy-env "PYTHONPATH")

Answer 2

If your environment variables are being set in ~/.bash_profile, Create a file called ~/.emacs_bash and put in it the following:

. ~/.bash_profile

Don't forget the newline at the end of that line or it won't be executed.

~/.emacs_bash is loaded by emacs when you run bash from within it, such as when using M-x shell or shell-command so you can use it to set any environment variables you want available.